I was actually exposed to this machine for the very first time this weekend, while visiting some friends. Before yesterday I had no idea a magical machine such as that existed, and I was startled to see it pop up here on Fark the day after. Two points:

First of all, screw you subby! I got all nervous as I clicked the link because I drank a metric shiat-ton of that stuff over the weekend, and I though this was some health-risk thing. Well-played, bravo, all that jazz, but seriously, what the hell?

Secondly, in response to TFA, good! Grumpy cat-level good! I never feel really fulfilled by small convienence appliances until I know they were made at the suffering of others, strengthened by the tears of the oppressed! I was rather meh about the thing until I read this, but now it is on my must-buy list!

/I know absolutely nothing about the socio-political situation being discussed here// wouldn't even be able to find it on a map/// I assume these people are brown?

and most of the items you use every day, including your car, food, and anything you buy is made in shiathole factories by underpaid slave labor, or children in other countries such as China, Japan, india, ect. We wanted cheap, the world delivered. Get over it.

jst3p:I have been thinking of buying one, any farkers want to say yea or nay?

Difficulty: I only drink diet soda and find most of them to taste nasty.

Diet coke, diet dew and diet dr pepper are OK.

I have one and I love it. The biggest issue is the initial cost. You can get around that by snagging an old machine plus a couple of empty bottles for $30 or so on Amazon. Take the canisters into a Bed Bath and Beyond to swap them out for about $25 (50-60 liters of carbonation) each. Then buy the individual flavors that you want. Around Memorial Day (start of wedding season), BB&B usually does a tasting demo with Best Buy. Ask the sales people when the rep last came in and estimate about 6-8 months between visits. If you get there and it's a low crowd, you can ask for some diet flavors to give a go.

I used to work in a home housewares/kitchen gadget store and we sold those things. I was damn good at selling/demoing the farkers.

The pros are it's easy to use and extremely simple if you're not picky about taste.The cons are long term necessity to begin to see your (very small) return on investment and non-dishwasher safe bottles. Neither are deal breakers.

Mixing various flavors (like orange and cream soda or the grape kool aid + diet lemon lime) get some pretty good results. I found that diet lemon lime is basically sprite and it mixes well with any "fruit" flavor. The regular cola isn't bad, but the large bottle "natural" cola (unprocessed cane sugar rather than processed cane sugar - thus requiring more syrup is pretty damn close to Coca Cola. I like mine, and treat it like a great toy, but I'm a fat guy with a sugar vice.

BunkoSquad:SodaStream is an Israeli company with a manufacturing plant in occupied territory in the West Bank, a fact that enrages a politically informed, far-left segment of the liberal-yuppie demographic the product is marketed to.

Who then get so mad they blog about it on their handcrafted artisan-probably-Navajo-made iPads which are totally not made by slave labor in the far east.

I wonder what it must feel like, to worry that much about where everything comes from. And how you reconcile that EVERYTHING you buy is soaked in the blood of innocents and powered by the soul of a forsaken child.

Maybe they just enjoy the feeling the pharisees must have had, being morally superior and yet morally inferior.

jaytkay:PC LOAD LETTER: Are they actually setting up a sweatshop in the West Bank or is this just a "ZOMG IZRALI COMPANY AND PALESTEENEEN WORKERS MEANS SLAVERY!!"

The company is in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank. They're displacing Palestinians, not hiring them.

Actually displacing them physically or "building on unoccupied land ceded to the Palestinian Authority that might one day be built upon by Palestinians". I mean the second is still a dick move, but there's a massive gulf between that and bulldozing buildings with babies inside or whatever. It's been a few years since the Israelis decided to plow down a neighborhood.

I've decided, after hearing just about all I care to hear from both sides of the Israel/Palestine thingy, that anyone* who gives one wet fart about the Israel/Palestine thingy is a flaming asshole. I heve never heard anyone have an opinion about it that isn't hopelessly colored by whatever ideology they fondle.

IT'S A farkING DESERT, PEOPLE! THERE IS NO GOD; THERE IS NO HOLY LAND! YOU ARE HALLUCINATING YOUR PHILOSOPHY! SHUT THE fark UP AND GET ALONG, YOU CHILDISH DOUCHEBAGS!

*With the exception of Roger Waters, who really dished it out to both sides at the UN.

And Malcolm in the Middle was produced by a company owned by an Israeli arms dealer who worked closely with apartheid South Africa and other shady characters. (You may not have known that.) But I love Katy Segal's voice (aka Leila of Futurama).

As much as I despise knee-jerk support for Israel, I am prepared to acknowledge they have a right to exist as much as the Palestinians do. Perhaps not as a helot military occupation like Ancient Sparta or not-so-ancient Twentieth Century Apartheid White South Africa, but as part of a two-state solution, yes.

Seeing as the adjective "blood" applies to the products of slave labour, looting, rape, torture, genocide, and murder in failed states in Africa, I think it might be over-blown or misapplied to a factory in the West Bank. I know those Israeli bastards are cunning and wicked, but they aren't forcing starving homosexual sex slaves to make designer gowns at bayonet point. That would be the Russians. (I keed, I keed, because I love.)

Is the logic of boycotting SodaStream the same as the logic of boycotting blood diamonds from the Congo or Sun City? Do the facts support this logic?

The SodaStream plant in the West Bank is one of 20 around the world, so the impact of the boycott on Paletinanian workers is likely to be slight. The old "but South African blacks depend on those jobs" argument is feeble in such a case, since there are 19 non-victims (presumably) for every supposed victim of Israeli capitalism.

The company produced a video that claims that the employees have relatively high pay (four times that available elsewhere in the West Bank) and health and social benefits, etc. An anonymous employee is quoted as saying the Palestinian workers feel like slaves and occupied people.

Who knows? I'm guessing the Israeli propaganda at least gets its numbers and facts straight. But gilded chains are still chains, so what are you going to do?

Scarlett Johansson , who is also a spokesperson for Oxfam, is "media ambassador" for the company and thus has come under criticism by the boycotters.

While I was a critic of the South Africa regime and its supporters, I don't see that boycotts are a very delicate or useful tool for protest. Too many people like a good product at a good price and even an effective boycott is a bit scattershot. On the other hands, boycotts do get media attention and sometimes press on the economic levers of even powerful and rich targets. The original Boycott was an absentee landlord in Ireland whose tenants refused to pay rents. He's famously infamous so boycotts must sometimes accomplish something.

But here's a question: are there any substitutes for the product in question? Indubitably: Coca Cola and Pepsi, for example. Unless you are boycotting them and all their sister companies. You should probably be boycotting bottled water in general. The poor are forced to pay through the nose for clean potable water while the rich get it almost free through every tap in their massive monster homes. Water is cheap--unless you are poor, in which case it is Unobtanium.

Just thinking out loud folks. I'm not going to tell you what to do, although donations would be welcome at many of the great humanitarian and developmental aid organizations in this crazy, sad, mixed-up confusing world.

So instead of having a CO2 canister that tucks neatly into the machine, you have to have that large ugly gray monstrosity sitting along side the machine on your counter top or drill a hole through the counter top or wall or whatever to store it elsewhere. All to save a penny or two on a liter of home made soda. Real genius plan.

jst3p:I have been thinking of buying one, any farkers want to say yea or nay?

Difficulty: I only drink diet soda and find most of them to taste nasty.

Diet coke, diet dew and diet dr pepper are OK.

I go with YEA - but honestly if you drink diet anything, I can mail you some cat urine and you won't know the difference... I get only the pure cane mixture and they have a soda stream water flavor with nothing added, just straight up concentrate. 1/2 teaspoon into one of the bottles and you have some really good flavored seltzer water.

Snarcoleptic_Hoosier:The regular cola isn't bad, but the large bottle "natural" cola (unprocessed cane sugar rather than processed cane sugar - thus requiring more syrup is pretty damn close to Coca Cola. I like mine, and treat it like a great toy, but I'm a fat guy with a sugar vice.

How does the cost/oz. really compare to Coca-Cola or Pepsi? I'm not a big soda drinker, but I do like my Pepsi Throwback, and if that taste could be perfectly replicated for a much cheaper price, I'd be interested....

AverageAmericanGuy:Some people just don't like it when Israel is involved in something. These people are typically anti-Semites, but I'll give these libs the benefit of the doubt and just refer to them as anti-Zionists (IOW, anti-Semites).

Those words don't mean what you think they mean.

Do you know what a Semite even is? Someone who lives in an area from which Semitic languages spring?

Don't let the ADL do all of the thinking for you.

I think if you actually deconstruct those words and look up what they mean, you will be very surprised.

brantgoose:But here's a question: are there any substitutes for the product in question? Indubitably: Coca Cola and Pepsi, for example. Unless you are boycotting them and all their sister companies. You should probably be boycotting bottled water in general. The poor are forced to pay through the nose for clean potable water while the rich get it almost free through every tap in their massive monster homes. Water is cheap--unless you are poor, in which case it is Unobtanium.

LOL. Almost free. You must come from a place where it rains sometimes.

Looking for carbonated blood got me this:Somewhere in Ohio, there's a soda-vending machine that instead of selling root-beer, inside the can you'll find the cool, carbonated blood of people who go missing on roads in the middle of the night. It does not take paper money, despite having the apparatus necessary.Instead, it takes your blood. Blood for blood, but not willingly.All righty then. Thanks internet.

MassAsster:jst3p: I have been thinking of buying one, any farkers want to say yea or nay?

Difficulty: I only drink diet soda and find most of them to taste nasty.

Diet coke, diet dew and diet dr pepper are OK.

I go with YEA - but honestly if you drink diet anything, I can mail you some cat urine and you won't know the difference...

Maybe you couldn't tell the difference. I would like to think I could but it sounds like you have me beat in the "who has tasted cat pee" department, so I guess I will never really know as well as you do.

Parthenogenetic:But yeah, I suppose there aren't a lot of pizzerias in Addis Ababa. The trains probably don't run on time, either.

The Italians occupied Ethiopia for about 5 years. There's a few decent Italian restaurants in Addis Ababa and spaghetti is the one of the more common western dishes on the menu. The excellent Ethiopian coffee has certainly benefited from the introduction of Italian coffee-making machines. There's one old train line from Addis to Harar and it's derelict. A new railway has just started construction.